What’s Changed (or Not) for Women Since the First International Women’s Day 100 Years Ago?

by Karin Ringheim, senior policy advisor

PRB is celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day with the launch of The World’s Women and Girls 2011 Data Sheet. Find more materials on PRB’s website.

March 8, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. It is hard to imagine that just 100 years ago, in 1911, women in the United States were still nine years shy of getting the vote. The women’s suffrage movement was going strong, and women in Wyoming had had the vote since Wyoming achieved statehood in 1890, but it was not until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that women throughout the United States were finally afforded the right to vote in 1920.    

In 1911, the U.S. population was 92 million, less than one-third of its current size of about 310 million. Life expectancy was 54 years for women and 51 for men. The leading cause of death, after heart disease, was tuberculosis. And 1 in10 children died before his or her first birthday. Our U.S. statistics of 100 years ago are much like those of sub-Saharan Africa today. 

In 1911, the global population was 1.8 billion, and today it has nearly quadrupled to 7 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the fastest growing region of the world and 42 percent of women in the region are under the age of 15 (compared with 19 percent in the United States). These young women will soon enter their reproductive years, and at current reproductive rates, the region’s population is expected to double in just 30 years. Women in sub-Saharan Africa give birth to an average of 5.2 children each, in comparison to U.S. women who today have an average of 2 children each. 

In 1911,  men in the United States were five times as likely as women to be gainfully employed.  And child labor was common: 26 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls ages 10 to 15 were employed as “breadwinners.”  Based on the higher levels of employment among boys, perhaps it is not surprising that three times as many girls as boys were enrolled in school. In 1911, U.S. women were more likely to have graduated from high school than men, but less than one-third of college graduates were women. Today, women outnumber men on college campuses in the United States. In developing countries, great strides have been made in girls’ education at the primary level, but less so at the secondary level. Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind the rest of the world, with only 34 percent of women enrolled in secondary school, and a far smaller percentage enrolled in college or professional schooling beyond high school.  

Nearly half of all wage earners in the United States are women, but among full time workers, they earn only 80 percent of what men earn. Women in the United States hold only 17 percent of public office seats at the federal level, far lower than in most regions of the world, and even slightly lower than in sub-Saharan Africa, where women hold 18 percent of parliamentary seats. 

By 1911, women in the United States had, on average, only 3.4 births each. How this was accomplished in the absence of widespread availability of birth control is not entirely clear, but condoms were available, as were “traditional” methods – withdrawal and periodic abstinence. The diaphragm, the first manufactured contraceptive method for women, was not widely known or available at that time because the federal Comstock Laws of 1873 made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices and information.  The Comstock Laws as they affected the sale and distribution of contraception were not overturned until 1936. By 1940, a third of all U.S. women used a diaphragm for contraception. Today, 79 percent of American women use a method of contraception, compared with only 23 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Few women on either continent rely on a diaphragm, despite its demonstrated safety and efficacy, even in low resource settings. 

While women in the United States clearly have some distance to go before gender equality is fully achieved, we can count many blessings. Virtually all U.S. women have skilled personnel attending them at birth, compared with only 46 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence of discrepancies in access to healthcare, a woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 31 lifetime risk of dying of causes related to pregnancy and delivery, while a U.S. woman faces a 1 in 2,100 lifetime risk. Three U.S. women in 1,000 are infected with HIV as compared with 68 per 1,000 women in sub-Saharan Africa, where 76 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world reside. In the region, 13 women become infected for every 10 men, and despite the assistance provided by the United States and other countries, the majority do not receive life-extending treatment.

Most of these recent statistics and many others can be found in PRB’s new datasheet, The World’s Women and Girls, 2011, published to commemorate this landmark anniversary of International Women’s Day. Given the resources, technologies, and a commitment to a world free of poverty, women in sub-Saharan Africa should not be forced to wait another 100 years before achieving the benefits that women in the developed world already enjoy. Nor should women in the United States require another century to gain social and economic equality. Happy International Women’s Day!

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